'Practical wisdom' and EU integration

The EU should focus less on economic relations and more on the worsening democratic conditions in the south-eastern candidate countries.

Turkish police fire tear gas on May day protesters, 2014. Demotix/ yenta kurtcebe. All rights reserved.In many potential or actual EU candidate states in south-eastern
Europe, rulers with authoritarian tendencies are in power. They increasingly
threaten the already weak pluralistic order, political freedoms, and civil
liberties in their countries, even if they seem on the surface to comply with
formal democratic rules.

Nikola Gruevski in Macedonia, Milo Djukanovic in
Montenegro, Aleksandar Vucic in Serbia, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, and
Milorad Dodik in the Republika Srpska inside Bosnia are the most appropriate
examples of this trend.

Labeled as democratically elected representatives,
these leaders continue to undermine the foundations of substantial democracy.
The conditions for fair elections are in most cases not met. Firstly, strong
pressure is exerted on the media. It is manipulated in favour of the government
parties. Secondly, supporting the government party is a necessary condition to
obtaining a job in the public sector. Furthermore, to secure power, government
parties distribute public resources as political patronage and follow
clientelistic politics in the form of vote buying.

Claims of signs of increasing authoritarianism
generally and manipulation of independent institutions, loosening boundaries
between the judiciary, executive, and legislative branches, and suppression of
the opposition and media more specifically have been on the upswing in south-eastern
Europe and Turkey in recent years.

The EU accession process contributes indirectly to the
consolidation of power by the authoritarian leaders in these countries. This
does not mean that the EU supports the authoritarian leaders from the Balkans
or Turkey; however, the relationship dynamics increase the possibility of the
misuse of the EU integration process by those leaders to consolidate their
power.

In most cases, until they secure power, these rulers
present themselves as Europhile and not Eurosceptic. The EU Commission’s
Progress Reports lack a nuanced analysis for differentiating between political
rhetoric and formal pseudo-democratic institutions on the one hand and the
genuine practice of democracy on the other.

For example, Macedonia, which is a candidate to join
the European Union, faces an escalating political crisis. Prime Minister Nikola
Gruevski has accused the chairman of the opposition party Zoran Zaev of being
an agent in cooperation with foreign intelligence services and of threatening
the constitutional order. Previously, Zaev threatened for months to make a
scandal known to the public. He showed a list of names of journalists whom he
claims were subjected to wiretapping.

This political crisis is a good example of the decline
of democracy in Macedonia, in other Balkan countries and also in Turkey. In
these countries, a clear pattern of suppression of political opponents and
independent journalists is observable. This suppression results in a climate of
fear in which critical media and intellectuals become reluctant to criticise
their own governments. Hence, the public is forced to be loyal to the
government.

As for the Turkish case, on 28 June 2012, sixteen EU
foreign ministers published a declaration called “The EU and Turkey: Stronger
Together,” arguing that Turkey was a secular and democratic country with a
growing middle class that can be seen as a model for its neighbors. Quite honestly,
these superficial statements gave the impression that the EU focused on the
economic side of relations and has neglected the internal dynamics of Turkish
politics and the democratic deficits that are becoming ever more serious.

The Islamist-conservative Justice and Development
Party (AKP), which has been in power for a period of twelve years and will most
likely win the general elections in 2015, threatens the principle of the
separation of powers by bringing the judiciary, executive, and legislative
branches, as well as the media under its control. As the AKP has moved from the
periphery to the center of the Turkish political system, using the EU accession
process, it has concentrated all the power in its own hands, leaving little
room for critical voices.

Accordingly, the following question is very critical:
To what extent and in what ways does the European accession process contribute
to the democratisation of candidate countries? This is a long-standing but
still not fully answered question. Centred on the role of party strategies, we
should analyse the degree to which ‘Europe’ has been strategically used in
connection to state restructuring at the domestic level. Justifying policy
positions on domestic state restructuring with reference to the EU accession
process makes power accumulation easier in the aforementioned countries.

The EU, therefore, should be aware of the strategic
use of ‘Europe’ in relation to state restructuring and power gaining
mechanisms. The conditions that are necessary and/or sufficient for political
parties to adopt such a strategy have been created by the EU’s lack of
‘practical wisdom’. The EU should not overlook the concept of Aristotle’s ‘phronesis’,
or ‘practical wisdom’ – the intellectual virtue of recognising and responding
to what is important in a given situation – in analysing the current political
atmosphere in south-eastern Europe and Turkey and shaping its relations with
these countries.

The instrumentalisation of EU policies and
institutions by domestic actors is not a new phenomenon. Domestic actors seem
initially to agree with the conditions of the EU, but do nothing to support
them and tend to use them merely as a means to advance their strategic and tactical
goals and consolidate their power. In conclusion, therefore, the EU should
formulate new criteria for substantial democracy.

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About the author

Dr. Can Büyükbay is Assistant Professor at the Turkish-German University in İstanbul. He holds a PhD degree in Political Science from the University of Zurich, where he also worked as a lecturer at the Department of Political Science and History.

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